Super Street Fighter IV Preview

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More fighters, modes, and barrel smashing in Capcom's follow-up.

By Charles Onyett

Street Fighter IV was only released last February, but the next installment, Super Street Fighter IV, is nearly here. After spending some time with the game, it seems as though it'll be the superior version. I can't really say if it's a definite must-have for someone who already bought Street Fighter IV, but if you missed SFIV last year, then you should pay attention to the Super version. It'll be made available in late April for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and comes along with 10 new fighters and a bunch of additional features.

So what's new in this version? Well, we already covered Hakan, the recently unveiled Turkish wrestler. The rest of the new cast, unlocked from the start, includes Ibuki and Dudley (from SFIII), Dee Jay (from Super SFII), T. Hawk (from Super SFII), Guy and Cody (originally from Final Fight), Adon (from Street Fighter), Makoto (from SFIII: 3rd Strike), and the all new Hakan and Juri. All the fighters from last year's Street Fighter IV are back as well, including Seth and Gouken, bringing the total number of fighters to 35.

In terms of modes, there's of course the arcade mode where you battle your way across the globe, fighting the AI until you get to Seth. I played through on medium, and after two encounters with Seth he seems a little less cheap than he did in Street Fighter IV. I'll have to play more to confirm that, but it's at least good news to people interested in completing the arcade mode with all the newcomers and seeing the additional bits of story. In arcade, you'll get to pick from eight difficulty settings, choose the number of rounds per match (up to seven rounds), set the time limit, and if you want bonus stages on or off.

You can also, like before, turn on the fight request system while playing arcade mode, which opens you up to receive fight requests from other players online, assuming you're connected. If you make make yourself available for ranked games, you'll play until you're matched up against another. This system should be more useful for the 2v2, 3v3, and 4v4 team battles, as you play the arcade mode while waiting for a lobby to fill up.

Anyone completely new to Street Fighter will likely want to spend time in the Challenge mode before heading anywhere else, since it gives you a chance to practice individual moves with each of the game's characters. As each move is correctly entered, the game then moves you into the next challenge, eventually tasking you with pulling off combos that progress in complexity. If one proves too difficult to pull off, you can just exit out and move along to the next one, giving you a sense of a character's strengths and weaknesses beyond the basic move list.

For a less structured method of acquainting yourself with the characters you can head into the training mode with any of the fighters. Here you'll be free to do whatever you want against an opponent that can't be killed, and can set a number of options to affect the status of battle. For example, you can turn on input display to see what buttons you're hitting, you can set the super and revenge gauges to infinite so they never deplete, and set it so your dummy opponent crouches, blocks, or jumps, depending on your training needs.

Eventually you'll be tired of training and ready to fight against a live opponent. There's always versus mode for local adversarial play, but if there's nobody around, it's online you go. You'll be able to customize your profile with a number of silly titles and icons to give your name tag a little bit of personality. I haven't played any online matches yet, but listed in the profile are Player Points, Battle Points, and a class, so it seems like these will be the systems on which people are ranked on the leaderboards. You'll be able to head into competitive play in one-on-one matches, team battles, and an endless battle where the winner of a match keeps on playing. You'll also find the extensive replay channel available in this mode which has a fancy menu screen where you can browse fight footage and flip through your saved replays. Overall it seems like a much more complete online experience compared to what shipped with the original game, and expect more coverage on this as it's explored further.

I know this might not be a big deal for some, but I was really happy to see the car smashing and barrel breaking bonus stages added back in. After spending so much time plowing through these pointless but entertaining challenges in arcades back in the Street Fighter II days, it's nice to see Capcom bring them back into the Arcade mode progression. In case you have no idea what I'm talking about, these mini-games occur between matches while playing arcade mode. In one, you'll need to break a car as quickly as possible, hopping from side to side of the vehicle while landing kicks, punches and special moves. In the other, you'll sit under a conveyor belt as barrels tumble down from above. By carefully timing attacks as the barrels fall you can break them apart, and depending on your performance you'll be scored at the end.

Along with all the new stuff, each fighter in the game now has access to two ultra moves. These are selected before heading into a fight, so you'll be stuck with whichever one you pick for the duration of the match. This means there are new ultras for all the returning characters, as well as two new ones for the 10 new fighters joining the cast. To see all the new ultra moves of the additional fighters, head on over to our video page where we've posted montages for the tier I and II versions.